As you recall, the first such documents were obtained and published by Glenn Greenwald, an American living in Brazil but working for the UK's Guardian newspaper. There had been a number of bizarre reports about just how far UK law enforcement wanted to go to intimidate journalists from reporting on such leaks in the future -- even forcing the Guardian to physically destroy a laptop that had the Snowden documents for no good reason other than security theater.

But that kind of intimidation has been taken up a notch. Greenwald's new publication, the Intercept, has been engaged in an ongoing Freedom of Information battle with the Metropolitan Police Service in the UK to find out if that organization is investigating journalists, and the police have finally confirmed that they are, in fact, investigating journalists, though it only does so obliquely, but "confirming" that "it continues to conduct an investigation into the events as described above" (with the "above" being the details laid out in the Freedom of Information request).

Of course, it doesn't appear that the reporters actually did anything wrong, and thus it seems fairly clear that the entire reason for the investigation is to create chilling effects for journalists who might publish such stories in the future and to harass those who published them in the past. The current UK government's continued move to use Orwell's 1984 as a guidebook, rather than a warning sign, is really reaching ridiculous levels.

from the narrative-controller-gripes-about-narrative-he-can't-control dept

Stewart Baker, former NSA General Counsel and unofficial apologist for the DHS, CIA and NSA, is still trying to pin the blame for everything on everyone that isn't a member of these fine American agencies. Privacy activists are to blame for TSA groping. Civil libertarians are to blame for the 9/11 attacks. FISA minimization procedures are also to blame for the 9/11 attacks. Encryption is to blame for the Blackberry's disappearance from the cellphone market. And so on.

Now, in an interview with Wired where he supposedly dispels "cyber-security myths," it's journalists who are to blame for people's distrust of government surveillance. But, you know, not in the flattering sort of way where uncomfortable truths are told and transparency is forced on reluctant, shadowy agencies. No, it's in the bad way where journalists didn't present a "fair" picture of domestic surveillance.

He leads off by saying there's no possible way to hold a "conversation" about surveillance programs because to do so compromises security. We're supposed to just trust the government on this, apparently.

This assertion is challenged by Wired's Caleb Garling, who asks Baker whether Snowden's leaks have served any positive purpose. Baker says there's nothing to be gained because it's journalists -- not the Executive Branch and the intelligence community -- that have been secretive and dishonest.

It was a scam from the start. Greenwald, Poitras, Snowden, and Bart Gellman did exactly what people like them have been accusing the intelligence community of doing for 40 years. They used the classification to tell a partial story in the hopes of shaping the debate, and they succeeded.

They released that order saying the government is scarfing up metadata about all your calls and they withheld, for roughly two weeks,* the [documentation] which they all had which showed all the limitations on that access. Why? Because they didn’t want a debate on the limitations—they wanted to leave the impression that everybody’s phone calls are looked at by NSA and they have succeeded in leaving that impression because of their manipulation of the classified information. That’s a shame.

*OMG ALMOST TWO WHOLE WEEKS

Left unmentioned by Baker is the fact that the government could have stepped in at any time and countered this mis-impression. But it never did. It still doesn't, at least not to any significant extent. When documents are served up by news agencies with access to them, they're routinely greeted with denials, refusals to comment or cliches about "lawful authority" and "oversight." Only very belatedly has the government experimented with transparency, and even in this, there's routinely more redaction than insight.

While it's true that the debate over security vs. privacy will always be somewhat hampered by security concerns, the US government spent years hiding its expanding surveillance programs from everybody, including oversight committees and the FISA Court. It made no effort over the next decade-plus to welcome the public to the debate -- mostly because it had already held this debate in the public's absence shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Now, government apologists like Baker want to blame the press for "skewing" the perception of these agencies and their tactics. But what other view could possibly have been presented? The government -- until June of 2013 -- held (almost) all the cards. Snowden gave journalists a deck of these own and Baker wants to criticize how the press played its limited hand.

Someone who spent years keeping information out of the public's hands (and applauds further efforts to do the same) is in no position to criticize the transparency efforts of others, no matter how subjectively much it looks like activists pitching skewed narratives.

from the yeah,-that's-convincing dept

We already wrote this morning about the ridiculous claims by The Sunday Times that Snowden's documents had been either given to the Russians and Chinese or that they had cracked the encryption to get them -- and that, because of this, the UK had to move intelligence "agents" out of Moscow for their safety. We pointed to numerous problems with the article, including many direct factual mistakes. One of the links we pointed to was Glenn Greenwald himself challenging many of the claims in the Sunday Times. This included highlighting the flat out lie that David Miranda was detained in Heathrow after visiting Snowden in Moscow (a claim the Sunday Times later simply deleted, with no correction or retraction).

Many people have been asking if the Sunday Times will say anything about the myriad problems with the article, and we now finally have a response. And it's... to send a DMCA takedown notice to Greenwald's publisher, First Look Media, claiming that, because he posted an image of the Sunday Times' front page layout, he is violating their copyright. Here's the section of Greenwald's article the Times (really, Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary of News UK, which is a subsidiary of News Corp) is complaining about:

The idea that this is somehow infringing is ridiculous. But here's what the lawyers at News Corp are claiming:

We write on behalf of Times Newspapers Limited (TNL) the publishers of The Times and The Sunday Times. TNL owns the copyright in the typographical arrangement of the front page of The Sunday Times published on 14 June 2015 (Material). The Material is an original work created by employees of TNL. A copy of the Material is enclosed.

A copy of the Material appears [on First Look's website] under the headline "THE SUNDAY TIMES' SNOWDEN STORY IS JOURNALISM AT ITS WORST -- AND FILLED WITH FALSEHOODS" (Infringing Content). The Infringing Content has been reproduced, communicated to the public and published onto the Website without TNL's permission and as such infringes the intellectual property rights of TNL....

Later, it notes:

... we have a good-faith belief that the use is not authorized by the copyright or other intellectual property rights owner, by its agent, or by law...

To put it mildly: this is ridiculous. Of course it's authorized by law, and that law is fair use. The UK may not have fair use, but the US does, and First Look is a US publication. The use above clearly and easily is fair use -- so much so that the lawyer for News Corp pretending otherwise is either the worst lawyer ever, or is being deliberately disingenuous with this threat letter.

Even more to the point: how could anyone at News Corp not realize how this would end up? There was no way that such a letter would have the intended purpose of taking down the content and the only thing it could do would be to draw extra attention to the fact that News Corp is trying to censor one of the people forcefully criticizing its ridiculous article, and highlighting what it got wrong. And, thus, the end result is further ridicule for News Corp, and further reasons to question the credibility of the Sunday Times.

from the that's-ridiculous dept

Last week, whistleblower Chelsea Manning was able to start tweeting from prison, while at nearly the same time reporter Barrett Brown lost his email access for an entire year for daring to email a journalist about bad prison conditions. If you don't recall, Barrett Brown is the reporter who was recently sentenced to more than five years in jail for reporting on the hacking actions of Anonymous. Bizarrely, the length of the sentence hinged on Brown's sharing a link in a chat room, even though the Justice Department dropped that particular charge. We also found it ridiculous that during the course of his trial, Brown was ordered by the court not to talk to journalists.

It appears that, once again, that was a part of the problem here. The judicial and correctional systems apparently really don't like it when you talk to journalists:

An hour or so after having used the system to contact a journalist about potential BOP [Bureau of Prisons] wrongdoing, Barrett Brown’s access to the TRULINCS prisoner e-mail system was restricted, for a full year until April 2016, without explanation.

This is contrary to the BOP’s own policy on several points, as noted in their 2009 documentation — the administration is only allowed to remove access to TRULINCS for thirty days pending an investigation of any potential misuse, and the inmate is supposed to be informed in writing of the reason for that.

But despite all of that, prison officials don't seem to care. They made it clear they just wanted to shut up Brown:

Barrett spoke to a supervisor this morning who told him that he lost his e-mail access because he was “using it for the wrong thing”. This refers to his contacts with the press. A review of his e-mail activity had been made, Barrett was also told by this person that he “wasn’t supposed to have” e-mail, when there’s been no such order or determination that we’re aware of.

Apparently, Brown had been talking to Glenn Greenwald about writing some articles for The Intercept, and that's what set off the Bureau of Prisons into a full-fledged lockdown on Brown's email account. Brown himself was later able to provide more details, suggesting a completely arbitrary process by a prison official:

Failing to find Mr. Coleman, I met that afternoon with Unit Manger Ivory, who checked my files but could find no reason why my access should have suddenly been suspended and also advised me to meet with Mr. Coleman. At some point that day, my attempts to log in started to prompt a different message stating: “This account is on suspension until 4/1/2016 11:59:59 pm (from portal 16)”. At the next lunch period on Thursday, April 2nd, I was unable to locate Mr. Coleman, but laid out my problem to the associate warden who told me to return in five minutes, when Mr. Coleman would be present.

I did so, and when I asked another group of prison officials if they knew where I could find Mr. Coleman, another individual came up to me and said that he was the person I was looking for. He pulled me aside and told me that he was the one who had cut off my email, as I wasn’t supposed to have access to it in the first place due to my charges. I noted that I had three charges and asked which one precluded me from using the email service. He told me to list my charges and I did so. He then added that he had done a review of my email correspondence and found that I had “been using it for the wrong thing.” I replied that I had simply been using it to communicate with the press. He confirmed that “that was the wrong thing.” I asked him his name, which he gave as “Moore”.

Yes, when you go to prison, you have given up a lot of your rights and freedoms. But this seems like a purely arbitrary decision to punish Brown for criticizing the prison system. And, it appears to be backfiring, only driving that much more attention to the issue.

from the wait,-what? dept

So we had just posted New Zealand Prime Minister John Key insulting the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, referring to him as a "henchman" and "a loser" for showing up in New Zealand to reveal that, contrary to Key's own claims, the country's GCSB (local equivalent of the NSA) had been engaged in mass surveillance of New Zealand residents. The documents Greenwald revealed showed how the Kiwi government was being pressured by the NSA to pass a law to fully "legalize" the program for mass surveillance of metadata. Further support to Greenwald's claims was provided in an article written by Ed Snowden, discussing just how easy it was to go surfing through the metadata collected on New Zealanders by GCSB.

Over the weekend, Prime Minister Key had said that once Greenwald revealed what he had, he would declassify a set of documents proving that Greenwald was wrong. Well, now Key has, in fact, declassified a set of documents from the GCSB... and they don't actually discuss what Greenwald or Snowden were talking about. Instead, they look like some internal discussions of why GCSB needed a (dangerous) program that would allow GCSB to try to spot and deal with foreign cyberattacks (similar to what the NSA wanted to do in the US, but which banks on Wall St. rejected).

So, basically all that Key has revealed is that GCSB supported an overly broad cyberattack plan that would let the GCSB take it upon itself to deal with cyberattacks -- a plan so insane that even the US has rejected it -- in part because it would massively increase surveillance. So, Key has revealed secretly approved plans to increase GCSB surveillance, while pretending he's debunking increased GCSB surveillance. And, yet, the documents don't even address any of Greenwald and Snowden's actual claims. When asked about that Key appears to have done his standard childish pouting, refusing to answer about specifics:

"There is not, and never has been, mass surveillance of New Zealanders undertaken by the GCSB.

He would not discuss XKEYSCORE, ''we don't discuss the specific programmes the GCSB may, or may not use''.

''But the GCSB does not collect mass metadata on New Zealanders, therefore it is clearly not contributing such data to anything or anyone," Mr Key said.

Frankly, this is a bit of a let down. Given the documents that Greenwald revealed on Monday, there was still the slight possibility that changes had happened along the way and people had rethought a bad plan. So I was wondering if Key might actually reveal something miraculous like that. Instead, it seems like he's trying a sleight of hand trick by declassifying and releasing unrelated documents (that actually reveal a secret surveillance expansion different from the one Greenwald revealed) and hoping no one notices. Interesting strategy. It seems to assume that the New Zealand populace doesn't actually pay attention to any details, which seems like a risky move.

from the not-very-convincing dept

Over the weekend, Glenn Greenwald made it clear that he was going to reveal evidence of domestic mass surveillance on New Zealanders by the GCSB (the Kiwi version of the NSA). The plan was to reveal it at a political event organized by Kim Dotcom. Before Greenwald even had the chance, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key tried to preempt the story by claiming that the country had considered such options, but never actually went through with it. He also used the opportunity to toss out random ad hominem insults at Greenwald, because that's always convincing.

"Dotcom's little henchman is wrong," says Mr Key..... "I'm probably not going to jump in front of what information he's got," says Mr Key. "It's up to the henchman to go and deliver that information I suppose, but mark my words, he's wrong. I'm right and I'll prove I'm right."

Except he did try to "jump in front" by revealing that there were plans in place for such a system and in promising to "declassify and release top secret documents" that would prove his side of the story.

This morning, Greenwald delivered on his half of the bargain with a detailed look at how the NSA was relying on New Zealand to change its laws to further legalize GCSB domestic surveillance. Greenwald got a further assist from Ed Snowden himself who wrote about how he regularly had access to New Zealanders' metadata, collected by the GCSB. Snowden's really damning point is that there was a simple "checkbox" if he wanted to turn off such searches:

If you have doubts, which would be quite reasonable, given what the last year showed us about the dangers of taking government officials at their word, I invite you to confirm this for yourself. Actual pictures and classified documentation of XKEYSCORE are available online now, and their authenticity is not contested by any government. Within them you’ll find that the XKEYSCORE system offers, but does not require for use, something called a “Five Eyes Defeat,” the Five Eyes being the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and yes, New Zealand.

This might seem like a small detail, but it’s very important. The Five Eyes Defeat is an optional filter, a single checkbox. It allows me, the analyst, to prevent search results from being returned on those countries from a particular search. Ask yourself: why do analysts have a checkbox on a top secret system that hides the results of mass surveillance in New Zealand if there is no mass surveillance in New Zealand?

Greenwald's piece further details how the NSA was pushing New Zealand to pass a new law last year to finalize the full legalization of this kind of surveillance, noting that the legal change was considered the final blockade on such a program. As we noted last year, while most of the world was passing laws to cut back on domestic surveillance, New Zealand was actually passing a law to expand those powers. While that bill was being debated, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key insisted that it was not enabling broad new domestic surveillance options, even though it was pretty clear from the text of the law.

At the time Key vehemently denied that it was legalizing domestic mass surveillance, responding to such claims by arguing "none of that is true." And yet, Greenwald highlights documents that show that the domestic surveillance program was entirely in place, just waiting for that last legal hurdle to be knocked down:

But in high-level discussions between the Key government and the NSA, the new law was clearly viewed as the crucial means to empower the GCSB to engage in metadata surveillance. On more than one occasion, the NSA noted internally that Project Speargun, in the process of being implemented, could not and would not be completed until the new law was enacted. The NSA apparently viewed that new law as providing exactly the powers that Key repeatedly and publicly denied it would vest.

And, of course, Key did this with pure and blatant FUD. At the time, he went on and on about immediate threats to the nation:

The Prime Minister says the country faces genuine security threats, while his opponents reckon he's being manipulative.

[....] John Key says he has received some briefings from intelligence agencies that have deeply concerned him.
"I think it would cut dead some of the most fancible claims I've heard lately from those who oppose this Bill."

Except there doesn't appear to be any evidence to support that. Just evidence that the NSA really, really wanted this bill to pass. As Greenwald highlights with newly revealed Snowden documents:

Critically, the NSA documents note in more than one place that completion of Speargun was impeded by one obstacle: The need to enact a new spying law that would allow the GCSB, for the first time, to spy on its own citizens as well as legal residents of the country. As one NSA planning document put it, completion of Speargun was “awaiting new GCSB Act expected July 2013.”

So far, Key's response is to ratchet up the insults. Beyond calling Pulitzer Prize-winning Greenwald a "henchman" a bunch of times, Key also called Greenwald "a loser," and tried to spin it all as a plot by Kim Dotcom:

"People got really wound up about me calling him Dotcom's little henchman. I would have a modicum of respect for the guy if he had the guts to turn up here six months before the election, or six months after. If this loser is going to come to town and try and tell me, five days before an election, staying at the Dotcom mansion with all the Dotcom people and being paid by Dotcom, that he's doing anything other than Dotcom's bidding - please don't insult me with that."

Except, of course, Greenwald has long explained that Dotcom agreed to pay Greenwald's usual speaking fee to charity (though, he did pay for Greenwald's flight to New Zealand). But, honestly, anyone following Glenn Greenwald for more than about five minutes would know that the guy is not exactly the kind of person who takes orders from anyone, no matter who's paying for what.

from the oh-really? dept

Politico is known as the snarky DC-based publication that seems to thrive on considering itself part of the infamous "church of the savvy," where reporting on the play-by-play of the horse race of politics is more important than exposing the truth. However, it apparently has a bit of an inferiority complex when it comes to Glenn Greenwald. A bizarre "profile" of Greenwald by Michael Hirsh tries to make the argument that Greenwald has "peaked" mainly because Politico appears to really, really, really want that to be true. Of course, as Jay Rosen pointed out, this is hardly the first time that Politico has asserted that Glenn Greenwald was over as a story. The site did so back in July of 2013, just a month after the first Snowden revelations, claiming "the new cycle has moved on" and "Greenwald doesn't seem to have any more big revelations up his sleeve."

The new piece from Hirsh has this perfectly ridiculous line about Greenwald, which shows the level of misguided "snark" in the article:

The rest is history. Or journalism. Or treason. Or something.

What is it? Who cares? We're just calling the horse races, and this Greenwald guy is a distraction, apparently.

This sort of tone is found throughout the piece, including this bizarre line:

Will there be many more Snowdens to come, based on Greenwald’s “model”? Perhaps. But it’s more likely that Greenwald Inc. has already peaked.

Of course, this comes just weeks after it was recognized (even by Politico!) that The Intercept is working with a new leaker who is clearly not Snowden, because the terrorism watchlist guidelines that Greenwald's The Intercept published came out after Snowden had already fled.

But, why bother with facts when the goal is to smear Greenwald as an also-ran?

There are many more problems with the piece, starting with the idea that anyone can even measure whether someone has "peaked" or not. But the whole thing has no facts in it, but just appears to be Politico's wishful thinking that this pesky outsider might just fade away.

from the 4chan-gone-professional dept

So you misspent your teenage years as a 4chan troll and are trying to figure out what to do for a career? Given the latest revelations from the Snowden Files by Glenn Greenwald over at The Intercept, you might want to consider taking a job for the UK's equivalent to the NSA, better known as GCHQ. As Greenwald details (and the embedded document below reveals), among GCHQ's capabilities in its Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) are a bunch of things that sound quite a bit like traditional internet trolling efforts. These include juicing internet polls to vote for GCHQ's favorite candidate (remember when moot was voted Time's Person of the Year in an online poll?) as well as flooding email inboxes or websites and even connecting two people on the phone and listening to the conversation.

Here are the programs Greenwald highlights:

“Change outcome of online polls” (UNDERPASS)

“Mass delivery of email messaging to support an Information Operations campaign” (BADGER) and “mass delivery of SMS messages to support an Information Operations campaign” (WARPARTH)

“A tool that will permanently disable a target’s account on their computer” (ANGRY PIRATE)

“Ability to artificially increase traffic to a website” (GATEWAY) and “ability to inflate page views on websites” (SLIPSTREAM)

“Amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular multimedia websites (Youtube)” (GESTATOR)

“Targeted Denial Of Service against Web Servers” (PREDATORS FACE) and “Distributed denial of service using P2P. Built by ICTR, deployed by JTRIG” (ROLLING THUNDER)

“A suite of tools for monitoring target use of the UK auction site eBay (www.ebay.co.uk)” (ELATE)

“Ability to spoof any email address and send email under that identity” (CHANGELING)

“For connecting two target phone together in a call” (IMPERIAL BARGE)

Of course, this is not the first time that JTRIG has been called out by Glenn Greenwald for its sneaky online practices. Last time, Greenwald highlighted its practice of putting a bunch of false info online about someone to destroy their reputation. This just digs deeper into some of the other "tricks" in JTRIG's trick bag. Still, it is rather astounding to me just how similar many of the items sound to the kinds of things generally associated with trolling behavior. It really makes you wonder if the folks working in JTRIG are just 4chan trolls who never really had to grow up.

from the want-to-try-that-again? dept

We already wrote about Glenn Greenwald's big story concerning how the FBI has been spying on prominent Muslim American politicians, lawyers and civil rights activists. If you follow this stuff closely, you may have heard that Greenwald was originally supposed to publish that story last week, but held off at the last minute due to some "new information" from the government. This resulted in some silly and ill-informed conspiracy theories, but in the article Greenwald explains what actually happened:

The Justice Department did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story, or for clarification about why the five men’s email addresses appear on the list. But in the weeks before the story was published, The Intercept learned that officials from the department were reaching out to Muslim-American leaders across the country to warn them that the piece would contain errors and misrepresentations, even though it had not yet been written.

Prior to publication, current and former government officials who knew about the story in advance also told another news outlet that no FISA warrant had been obtained against Awad during the period cited. When The Intercept delayed publication to investigate further, the NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence refused to confirm or deny the claim, or to address why any of the men’s names appear on the FISA spreadsheet. Prior to 2008, however, FISA required only an authorization from the attorney general—not a court warrant—for surveillance against Americans located overseas. Awad frequently travelled to the Middle East during the timeframe of his surveillance.

The fact that it was out warning people that the story was inaccurate before anything had even been written is... quite telling. Also, the fact that it only seemed to focus on the lack of a FISA warrant (and against one individual) seems like the standard form of the intelligence community choosing their words especially carefully to say one thing, while implying something else entirely. Now that the report has actually come out, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has issued a statement that is more of the same. You will note, for instance, that it does not deny spying on the five named individuals -- only that it doesn't spy on people because of their political, religious or activist views:

It is entirely false that U.S. intelligence agencies conduct electronic surveillance of political, religious or activist figures solely because they disagree with public policies or criticize the government, or for exercising constitutional rights.

Unlike some other nations, the United States does not monitor anyone’s communications in order to suppress criticism or to put people at a disadvantage based on their ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation or religion.

Our intelligence agencies help protect America by collecting communications when they have a legitimate foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purpose.

Again, note the specific denial they're making. They're not denying they spied on these five individuals. They're claiming that if they spied on them, it wasn't because of their religion -- though the evidence presented in the Intercept article certainly rules out many other explanations. And, remember, it was just a week ago that it was revealed that the NSA, does, in fact, consider people interested in Tor or open source privacy to be extremists. So, while it may be technically true that these individuals weren't targeted because of their religion, it does seem fairly clear that the intelligence community has fairly low standards for what it takes to convince themselves that someone may be a threat.

Furthermore, the statement admits that there are cases where it spies on people without approval from the FISA Court, but doesn't say what those examples are beyond "in an emergency." That may imply the only cases are in an emergency, but that's not what the statement actually says:

With limited exceptions (for example, in an emergency), our intelligence agencies must have a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to target any U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident for electronic surveillance.

These court orders are issued by an independent federal judge only if probable cause, based on specific facts, are established that the person is an agent of a foreign power, a terrorist, a spy, or someone who takes orders from a foreign power.

And, again, as the Intercept report itself notes, prior to 2008, there were different standards in place for people traveling overseas (even Americans) which could explain how some of these individuals were targeted.

The ODNI statement more or less concludes by suggesting that the five people named may have been agents of foreign powers, which is quite a claim:

No U.S. person can be the subject of surveillance based solely on First Amendment activities, such as staging public rallies, organizing campaigns, writing critical essays, or expressing personal beliefs.

On the other hand, a person who the court finds is an agent of a foreign power under this rigorous standard is not exempted just because of his or her occupation.

It's a neat little out. Accused of spying on five Americans who pretty clearly do not appear to be agents of foreign powers, just hint strongly that they really are agents of foreign powers. It's back to the good old days of McCarthyism.

Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public office who held a top-secret security clearance and served in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush;

Asim Ghafoor, a prominent attorney who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases;

Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of international relations at Rutgers University;

Agha Saeed, a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights;

Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.

This certainly harkens back to the days of spying on Martin Luther King and other human rights activists -- the kind of thing that was supposed to have stopped decades ago. In fact, the driving reason for setting up the FISA Court was to prevent this kind of thing. As Greenwald's report notes, these individuals were on a list of folks who the DOJ had convinced the FISA Court that there was "probable cause" were engaged in terrorism.

The individuals appear on an NSA spreadsheet in the Snowden archives called “FISA recap”—short for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the Justice Department must convince a judge with the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there is probable cause to believe that American targets are not only agents of an international terrorist organization or other foreign power, but also “are or may be” engaged in or abetting espionage, sabotage, or terrorism. The authorizations must be renewed by the court, usually every 90 days for U.S. citizens.

The spreadsheet shows 7,485 email addresses listed as monitored between 2002 and 2008. Many of the email addresses on the list appear to belong to foreigners whom the government believes are linked to Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah. Among the Americans on the list are individuals long accused of terrorist activity, including Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, who were killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen.

But a three-month investigation by The Intercept—including interviews with more than a dozen current and former federal law enforcement officials involved in the FISA process—reveals that in practice, the system for authorizing NSA surveillance affords the government wide latitude in spying on U.S. citizens.

Reading through the report, it becomes quite clear that the main reason these individuals on the list is solely because they're Muslim. Of every lawyer who has helped represent defendants in terrorism-related cases, the only one on this list just happens to be Muslim. As the article reminds us, a few years back, Spencer Ackerman did some great reporting, revealing how the FBI was being trained to believe all Muslims were "violent" and "radical" and the impact of that ridiculous training appears to be clear in what this latest report finds. Perhaps the most chilling example of this anti-Muslim attitude is found in a training document revealed in this new report, showing intelligence community members how to "identify" targets for the FISA court. The "placeholder" name says it all:

Later in the report, the government tries to deny that there was a FISA Court order concerning at least one of the individuals listed above, even though they were in the spreadsheet. But that level of confusion only suggests that the process is even more of a mess. Whether or not this complied with the law is a distraction. The law shouldn't allow this kind of thing.

A former Justice Department official involved in FISA policy in the Obama Administration says the process contains too many internal checks and balances to serve as a rubber stamp on surveillance of Americans. But the former official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about FISA matters, acknowledges that there are significant problems with the process. Having no one present in court to contest the secret allegations can be an invitation to overreach. “There are serious weaknesses,” the former official says. “The lack of transparency and adversarial process—that’s a problem.”

Indeed, the government’s ability to monitor such high-profile Muslim-Americans—with or without warrants—suggests that the most alarming and invasive aspects of the NSA’s surveillance occur not because the agency breaks the law, but because it is able to exploit the law’s permissive contours. “The scandal is what Congress has made legal,” says Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU deputy legal director. “The claim that the intelligence agencies are complying with the laws is just a distraction from more urgent questions relating to the breadth of the laws themselves.”

Much of the rest of the story involves a detailed look at the men listed above, all of which is worth reading, demonstrating just how ridiculous it was to be spying on their communications. The video of Faisal Gill is really worth watching: